12/03/2009

I keep on looking through Redmine. And one of the most basic persistent XSS - problem of placing <title> prior to <meta> - still often ignored by developers. The same thing occurred in Drupal some time ago. Same thing is currently in Redmine.

The idea of this XSS vector is that tag <title> is placed before tag <meta>, which specifies character encoding of page. Good browsers look for <meta> upon page opening, ignoring its position, but Internet Explorer 6/7 (not quite sure about latest one), in case described above, uses <title> to define encoding. So if you create page (within Redmine, it will be "Issue") with title

+ADw-script+AD4-alert('XSS');+ADw-/script+AD4-

and open it in IE with Auto-Select Encoding on, browser will think that encoding of the page is UTF-7 and will interpret +ADw- as < and +AD4- as >. Thus arbitrary JavaScript will be executed, evading built-in filters .

P.S. Vendor was contacted and Eric Davis informed me, that this vulnerability will be fixed in new version along with CSRF, which wasn't fixed in 0.8.7.P.P.S. Proof-of-Concept is here